Unified Access to Media Metadata on the Web

The goal of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Media Annotation Working Group (MAWG) is to promote interoperability between multimedia metadata formats on the Web. Audio-visual data is omnipresent on today's Web, but different interaction interfaces and especially diverse metadata formats prevent unified search, access, and navigation. MAWG has addressed this issue by developing an interlingua ontology and an associated API. This article discusses the rationale and core concepts of the ontology and API for media resources. The specifications developed by MAWG enable interoperable, contextualized, and semantic annotation and search, independent of the source metadata format, that connects multimedia data to the Linked Data Cloud.